Review

The Criminal Procedural Code of Ukraine took effect on 20 November 2012, and since then 51 amendments have been made thereto.

Many of them were caused by the objective factors: the State’s direction toward visa regime liberalization for Ukraine; necessity to ensure the State is functioning in its special social and political period; creation of new subjects of procedural activity; and necessity to improve the proceedings mechanism and measures on criminal proceeding enforcement.

Concurrently, certain events in political, economic, and social domains became a force for change while being of an ad hoc nature. At the time of their happening, neither the effects on public bodies, which are governed by the procedural legislation rules, nor the ones on the society in general were taken into account.

Analyzing the amendments made to the Code, one may safely say that the essential part of related draft laws was not duly elaborated by law specialists prior to their being submitted to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine for approval thereof. As experience in the field has consequently shown, some of them proved to be incompatible with other provisions of the Criminal Procedural Code and regulatory acts, to which academic processualists drew attention repeatedly.

This has led to law administration problems, the rise of artificial competition between the provisions, and ambiguity in applying thereof, which, in its turn, frequently resulted in new and, often, repeated, amendments to the same articles of the Criminal Procedural Code of Ukraine. For instance, the Article 170 of CPC (“seizure of property”) was amended 4 times, whereas the wording of the provision was changed twice.

The Parliament’s recently voted draft laws No 6220 as of 22.03.2017 and No 6232 as of 23.03.2017 are not an exception to the sketchy legislators’ work either. Random amendments, put forward by parliamentarians, will only lead to unenforceability for the criminal proceedings parties to exercise their rights and obligations effectively and unenforceability to perform pre-trial investigation in line with the provisions of the Article 2 of the Criminal Procedural Code of Ukraine. This, in its turn, will neutralize the essence of such regulatory act being adopted as a global step to legislation improvement.

Key words: CPC, amendments to CPC, legislative trends, draft law.